Peppers, Trees and Clippers

I recently planted three maple trees. One of them was my (belated) Easter present, and is a Canyon/Bigtooth Maple (acer grandidentatum). The other two are Japanese coral-bark maples. One of those looks okay. The other...probably isn't going to make it. *shrugs* It came from Wal-Mart. If it needs replacement, I'll go elsewhere. But that's old news. I've been quite, quite busy the last few days.

I've been gradually getting my garden planted. Yay! I have a garden again! I've got some corn, some sugarsnap peas, some herbs, some nasturtium, and a whole bunch of pepper plants. The pepper plants I bought, since the ones I tried to start aren't far enough along to produce much of anything before the end of summer. The rest gets to grow from seed. Now that 's my idea of magic. Stick a seed in the ground, keep it watered, and soon you have a huge plant producing food and more seeds. Awesome. Anyway, I planted two jalapeño, one green bell, six orange bell, four ivory bell, four Hungarian wax, six cherry, four hot cherry... and I think that's it, but I found three orange bell plants today. They still need to be planted. I'm hoping to find a few red bell plants as well. Oh, and I planted a tomato plant, for my mom. I don't like fresh tomatoes; she does.

I've still got some room in the area of weeds that I roto-tilled into submission with my dad's rototiller. So, as I said, I'm on the lookout for more pepper plants, and anything left I'll probably use up the rest of my corn and pea seeds on.

Today, though, I went to work on my elm tree. It was the only tree on this lot when I bought the place. I'm not overly fond of elms, as they produce copious amounts of oat-shaped seeds, but it does shade the back yard. It was planted too close to a clothes line post, and one end of the 'T' has been digging into it for several years. I started to cut off the offending piece a while back...and got distracted. But that meant that I had less left to saw through than I would have had I been starting from scratch. I got out the ol' hacksaw, found a semi-stable spot for the ladder, and went to work. With about a half-inch left at the bottom, the hacksaw blade broke, at least in part because the further I got, the more the pressure from the tree pushed on the cut-off bit. So I nodded to myself, and went inside to get the hammer and mallet. It took a while, but I eventually managed to get the stuck piece to come off by hitting it in the direction it was already being pushed. I think I annoyed some neighborhood dogs with the racket, too. :^) Since I had the ladder out, I went and got a different saw and tackled some large dead branches, too. Now I have to figure out what to do with them... If my dad were not incapacitated, I could offer them to him as firewood. As is, I don't want to encourage him to light fires while blind.

And lastly, I applied one-inch clippers to my hair. I had planned to wait until June, but it was getting long enough that I had started attacking my hair with a razor in the shower. At that point, it's only a matter of time before I inflict unconcealable damage, so I figured a pre-emptive strike was in order.